A ControlUp Hybrid Cloud implementation is composed of three main components; a Console for real time environment monitoring and management, Monitor to monitor your environment 24/7 and upload historical and analytics data to our Hybrid Cloud infrastructure, and Agents to communicate with the Console and Monitor.

ControlUp Console Requirements

ControlUpConsole.exe is the main executable used for data display and task invocation. There is no setup routine necessary in order to start using ControlUp. Just download the executable and run it on your admin station or a management server.

ControlUp console was tested on:

Windows 7

Windows 8 and 8.1

Windows 10

Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2016.

ControlUp Console is the primary user interface for monitoring and managing your resources.

The Console requires no database.

All the data you see in it is stored in RAM, which allows for blazingly fast manipulation of data. As a result, ControlUp Console memory usage can be intensive, depending on the number of managed machines.

A RAM footprint of about 1GB (Working Set) is normal when managing an enterprise with up to 500 live user sessions, while thousands of sessions can bring the console’s RAM usage up to several gigabytes.

In larger environments we recommend using a high-performance server for running the console. There are also some performance optimizations you should consider in order to reduce the amount of resources used by ControlUp Console. Please refer to the Advanced Settings documentation page for more details.

Prerequisites for ControlUp Console

Domain joined desktop or laptop, Windows VM, or can be published as a XenApp application.

.Net 4.5

No installation required. Simply download the executable from our website.

AD account with help-desk or higher permissions in the 7.15 environment (and the Broker IP or host name)

Firewall exceptions inside the company for RPC/WMI and ports 40705 and 40706 (or Windows firewalls off)

Internet connectivity from the monitor and Console machines (it can be via proxy)

ControlUp Monitor Requirements

ControlUp Monitor is a component principally equivalent to ControlUp Console, but without an interactive user interface. Once installed and started, ControlUp Monitor signs into your ControlUp organization and connects to your managed computers. The Monitor starts receiving system information and performance updates from your organization, just like an additional ControlUp Console user. The primary difference between a Monitor and a Console is the fact that the Monitor runs as a Windows service, requiring no user interaction and allowing for continuous monitoring of your resources.

Benefits of ControlUp Monitor

ControlUp Monitor offers a number of benefits to admins who require continuous monitoring of their resources:

After a Monitor is installed in the organization, monitoring of resources is a continuous process, running 24/7 regardless of the presence of active ControlUp Consoles in the network. Multiple Monitor instances automatically provide mutual backup and high availability for monitoring.

Monitors can be configured to alert ControlUp users about incidents that cannot be detected by ControlUp Console. For example, only the Monitor records “Computer Down” incidents, since detection of this incident requires continuous monitoring.

ControlUp Monitor can be configured to export data tables to disk in CSV format for further analysis. The scheduled export process runs in the background and ensures continuous logging, which cannot be guaranteed using the interactive Console.

The Monitor is mandatory for uploading data to ControlUp Hybrid Cloud Insights and for exporting activity files for the Insights On-Premises

Respectively, the following limitations apply to ControlUp organizations which do not have a Monitor instance installed:

Monitoring of resources and alerting about system issues can only occur if at least one instance of ControlUp Console is active and connected to the entire organization.

“Computer Down” incidents cannot be detected or recorded.

In order to support historical reporting and trending analysis, at least one instance of ControlUp Console has to be connected to the entire organization and configured to export data tables to disk.

Prerequisites for ControlUp Monitor

ControlUp Monitor can be deployed to any computer running Windows Server 2008 or later. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5 features to be enabled and RPC access to be enabled at the installation phase. In addition, in order to enable the Monitor Service to connect to all your managed computers, you will need to assign domain credentials to the Monitor Service as described below in the "Domain Identity" section of the Monitor Deployment guide.

ControlUp Agent

The ControlUp Agent is a lightweight service that gets installed on the managed computers in your organisation. Installing the Agent on your systems allows you to use ControlUp Real Time Console to perform in depth monitoring, advanced systems management, and in depth configuration evaluation.

ControlUp On-Premises Architecture

ControlUp On-Premises mode enables organizations to install the ControlUp back-end components on their on-premise private cloud / data-center. The following drawing is a high-level overview of ControlUp 7.x architecture when working in On-Premises mode:

On-Premises Server Prerequisites:

Supported Operating Systems

Windows Server 2016 Fully Patched

Windows Server 2012 R2 Fully Patched

Windows Server 2008 R2 Fully Patched

Requirements

Free space of 50 GB

4 GB of RAM

2 vCPUs

Join server to Domain

Disable the UAC

Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5.1

Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5

Database

Supports Microsoft SQL Server versions –

SQL Server 2014 Standard, and Enterprise Editions.

SQL Server 2012 Standard, and Enterprise Editions.

Note –

It is recommended to separate the ControlUp server from the SQL server for better performance

SQL 2008 is NOT supported (R2 as well), in case you are upgrading from v5, you will need to upgrade from v5 > v6 > v7 etc. Not recommended to jump from 5 to 7.

We strongly recommend to have a dedicated clean server from the installation

The ControlUp data base needs to be moved to a supported SQL

In the on-premises upgrade wizard define the new SQL details

Run the exported upgrade SQL script on the ControlUp DB (follow the installation guide)

SQL Data Base recommended size - 50GB

Email Alerts Feature

Requires a local SMTP Server.

Required Files

Please coordinate with ControlUp Support to receive the installation media for ControlUp On-Premises

License

ControlUp On-premises requires a license file provided by ControlUp

The license is a XML file

In order to receive the file, please follow the steps described in step 3 of the ControlUp On-premises installation guide.

Required AD Users & Groups

ControlUp Users Group

Members of this group will be authorized to use the ControlUp console.

Global AD groups are supported.

'Domain Users' group is not supported.

ControlUp Service Account

The ControlUp service account runs the ControlUp On-premises server services, IIS Pools and will have db_owner right on the SQL database

Note – the installation wizard supports configuring a different account for the SQL database user

Primary Monitor Account -

Account defined in the monitor settings -> Identity

The Monitor primary AD account require the "Log on Locally" user right on the Monitor service VM, so please verify 2 things:

Appendix

During the installation we add IIS and LDS Roles to the ControlUp On-Premises Server

If the IIS is already installed and contains any other sites, they will be overwritten

ControlUp’s Insights Server Prerequisites:

Supported Operating Systems

Windows Server 2016 Fully Patched

Windows Server 2012 Fully Patched

Windows Server 2012 R2 Fully Patched

Requirements

Free space of 50 GB (as starting point)

CPU: 2 x 6 cores of 2+ GHz

RAM: 12 GB

RAID: 0 or 1+0

Note:

Make sure the server does not have splunk already installed, we do not support parallel installations.

RAID 0 disk configurations do not provide fault-tolerance. Confirm that a RAID 0 configuration meets your data reliability needs before deploying a Splunk Enterprise indexer on a system configured with RAID 0.

In an enterprise production deployment, it is recommended that ControlUp Insights On-Premises is provided with dedicated hardware resources, especially I/O. Running the system on virtual machines is supported, but performance is expected to degrade when hardware resources are allocated from a shared pool.

Daily Indexing Volume

The daily amount of data ingested into the Insights database is a key parameter that will be used for deployment and capacity planning. This parameter can be estimated using the following calculations:

For end-user computing workloads using shared desktops (e.g. in a server-based computing scenario using Remote Desktop Services) - 3MB per user / day

For end-user computing workloads using private desktops (e.g. in a VDI scenario) - 6MB per user / day

The end result of the calculation above (6.24 GB) is the daily indexing volume that will be used for capacity planning of Insights database storage as described below.

Insights Database

The sizing of storage for hosting the Insights database is based on the daily indexing volume multiplied by the number of days for which data is expected to be retained in the database, and by then multiplied by an additional constant which estimates the overhead associated with summary indexing and other auxiliary data accumulated in the database.

For example, an environment in which the daily indexing volume is 6.24 GB and the retention requirement is 365 days, the amount of disk space required for the Insights database is expected to be 2.28 TB. This estimate should be multiplied by 1.3 to predict indexing overhead, resulting in a total storage volume of 2.96 TB.

Data File Share

The data file share is a temporary storage location in which activity files are queued before ingestion into the Insights database.

The recommended amount of free space available on the data file share depends on the daily indexing volume.

By default, activity files are not removed from the data file share after being successfully ingested into the Insights database. It is therefore recommended that the data file share has sufficient capacity to accommodate activity files for the maximal period of time during which Insights On-Premises Server might be down.

For example, to accommodate for 7 days of downtime in the example environment described above, the data file share size should be 6.24 GB x 7 days = 43.68 GB.

Note:

Please give modify permissions to the Monitors primary AD account on the shared folder of the data activity files (both share and NTFS).

Please add the Monitors primary AD account to the local Performance Log Users Group (On the Monitor server).

The Monitors primary AD account requires the permission "Log on Locally" on the Monitor VM where the service is installed.

The Monitors primary AD account can not be assigned the group policy "Deny log on locally"

Until further notice we do not remove the activity files from the shared folder. Please make sure you have enough free space and the needed hardware to support the IOPS activity.

The IOP Server's AD machine account must have read access to the file share via both NTFS and Share permissions.

ControlUp Real Time Console

Supported Operating Systems

Windows 7

Windows 8 and 8.1

Windows 10

Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2016

The only software prerequisite for the console is Microsoft .NET 4.5. Please ensure this prerequisite is met before running ControlUp or when upgrading from older (pre-v6) versions of ControlUp.

ControlUp Monitor

Supported Operating Systems

Windows Server 2008 R2 or later

Other Prerequisites

.Net Framework 4.5

RPC Access (at the installation phase)

Powershell 5.0 (for Windows PS API)

The Monitor primary AD account require the "Log on Locally" user right on the Monitor service VM (the service account defined in the monitor settings-> identity tab). So please verify 2 things:

Alternatively, .NET Framework 4.5 can be used on managed computers running Windows 8 / Server 2012 or later

ControlUp requires RPC access for remote agent installation and a single configurable incoming TCP port open (40705 by default) for agent communication. In case your managed computers are inaccessible using RPC, you can deploy the ControlUp agent using an MSI package. For more details, see “Add Managed Computers”.

Active Directory is a prerequisite for managing computers using ControlUp. If your network includes computers that are not joined to a domain, you will be able to connect to these computers using ControlUp’s Remote Desktop view while other actions will not be available.

The computer on which ControlUp Console is executed does not have to be a domain member. However, you will be required to enter valid domain credentials in order to manage computers in your environment.

Full DNS name resolution is also mandatory for management connections using ControlUp. You should be able to access all of your managed computers using their Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN).

As an exception to the above, virtual machines (including non-Windows guests) can be monitored via the hypervisor layer without the need for DNS resolution or AD domain membership. This agentless approach only enables access to VM-related data known to the hypervisor, not guest OS data. (Read more…)

By default, ControlUp queries Active Directory for the DNS suffix when managed computers are added to the organization tree. For networks in which the domain name is not identical to the default DNS suffix of all computers, ControlUp supports for providing a custom DNS suffix during computer addition. (More details…)

By default, local administrative privileges on all managed computers are required in order to connect to these computers using ControlUp. Every time you attempt to run a management action using ControlUp, your Windows credentials will be evaluated according to your current ControlUp mode:

Enterprise Mode – in this mode ControlUp operates by evaluating both your current Windows credentials and the Security Policy configured using your organization’s central configuration. In Enterprise Mode the permissions may be restricted to limit access to ControlUp features for designated administrators, regardless of their existing Windows rights.

Standalone Mode – your Windows user account will always need to have full administrative rights on all target computers. If your account is not a local administrator on the managed computer, ControlUp agent will refuse the connection and you will not be able to monitor performance or execute management actions on that computer.

Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V 2016including standalone and clustered hosts. Please note that ControlUp Agent needs to be installed on the Hyper-V hosts to enable monitoring them as hypervisors (The console does not work on any version of Core, but the agent is fine as long as you have .Net 3.5.1 or .Net 4.6.2.).

Network Connectivity

Hypervisor Permissions

VMware

Required vCenter permissions: the Read-Only role is sufficient for all monitoring purposes. If you want to be able to use the built-in hypervisor-based VM power management functions, then you will need to create a custom role based on the Read-Only role, adding the following permissions:

In the Virtual Machine/Interaction category:

Power Off

Power On

Reset

vSAN Prerequisites

In order to retrieve vSAN metrics and meta data, please follow these requirements

The user account configured for the hypervisor connection requires the "storage.View"

XenServer

If Active Directory authentication is enabled for the XenServer pool, then the Read-Only role is sufficient. If you want to be able to use the built-in hypervisor-based VM power management functions, then you will need to upgrade the user role to ‘VM Operators’.

Nutanix

ControlUp requires for the user\service account to have 'Viewer' only role for view only capabilities (the user that you connect your Console to the hypervisor with). If you want to perform VM power management & host maintenance actions, you'll need to grant the user\service account with the 'Cluster Admin' role.

In order to use a dedicated user\service account that you already have configured in your environment - you'll need to add your organizational Active Directory to Nutanix by going into Prism, Click the Gear Icon> 'Authentication'. When you're finished with adding your AD - you can 'Test' the connection in ControlUp console and verify that it works.

If you don't want to connect your AD to your Nutanix cluster, you can create a local user in the Nutanix local management within Nutanix Prism. Click the Gear Icons > 'Local User Management' and add the user with the proper role required.